66 He feels from Judah's land, The dreadful Infant's hand. The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn. Nor Typhon huge, ending in snaky twine. Our Babe, to show his Godhead true, Can, in his swaddling bands, control the damned crew." Closely connected with this doctrine of divine unity, is that of divine omnipresence. To the Hebrews, the external universe is just a bright or black screen concealing God. All things are full of, yet all distinct from, him. That cloud on the mountain is his covering; that muttering from the chambers of the thunder is his voice; that sound on the top of the mulberry-trees is his 'going;" in that wind, which bends the forest or curls the clouds, he is walking; that sun is his still commanding eye-Whither can they go from his Spirit? whither can they flee from his presence? At every step, and in every circumstance, they feel themselves God-inclosed, God-filled, God-breathing men, with a spiritual presence lowering or smiling on them from the sky, sounding in wild tempest, or creeping in panic stillness across the surface of the earth; and if they turn within, lo! it is there also-an "Eye" hung in the central darkness of their own hearts. Hence the muse of the Hebrew bard is not Dame Memory, nor any of her syren daughters, but the almighty, all-pervading Spirit himself, who is at once the subject, the auditor, and the inspirer of the song. What heart, in what age or country, has not, at some time or other, throbbed in the expectation of a Messiah, a "Coming One," destined to right the wrongs, stanch the wounds, explain the mystery, and satisfy the ideal, of this wondrous, weary, hapless, and "unintelligible" world-who shall reconcile it to itself, by giving it a purer model of life, and a nobler principle. of action-who shall form a living link, wedding it to the high and distant heaven--who shall restore the skies, the roses, and the hearts of Eden, and instruct us, by his plan of reconcilia tion, that the fall itself was a stage in the triumph of man? Humanity has not only desired, but has cried aloud for his coming. The finest minds of the Pagan world have expressed a hope, as well as a love of his appearing; it might indeed be proved that this "Desire of all Nations" lies at the foundation of all human hope, and is the preserving salt of the world. From earth to heaven, the question was for ages reverberated, "Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof ?" And for ages, all earnest men wept much because the volume remained shut. But in the minds of the Jews, this feeling dwelt with peculiar intensity and concentration. It rendered every birth a possible epoch; it hung a spell over every cradle. The Desire of all Nations was, in a profound sense, the desire of Jewish females. From the heart, it passed naturally into the imagination, and from thence into the poetry of the land, which is rarely so sublime as when picturing the character and achievements of the Desired and Expected One. This desire, in what singular circumstances was it fulfilled! The earth was at rest and still. The expectation of many ages had come to its height. In the hush of that universal silence, we may imagine the hearts of all nations panting audibly, with strong and intolerable longing. And when the expectation was thus at the fullest, its object arrived. And where did the Desire of all Nations appear? Did he lift up his head in the palaces of Rome, or the porticoes of Athens? No; but he came where the desire was beating most strongly-to the core of the great heart which was panting for him to the village of Bethlehem, in the midst of Judea, and the neighborhood of Jerusalem. And how came he? Was it in fire and glory, robed in a mantle of tempest, and with embroideries of lightning? No; but as a weeping babe! "To us a child" was given. And all who had entered into the genuine spirit of the ancient poetic announcements, felt this to be "very good." The doctrine of a millennium must surely have been a pure emanation from Heaven. As a mere dream, we could conceive it crossing the brain of a visionary, or quickening the eager pen of a poet as he wrote it down. But, as a distinct, prominent, and fixed prospect, in the onward view of the philanthropist― as any thing more than a castle in the clouds-it seems to have been let down, like Jacob's ladder, from a higher region. Even granting that it was only a tradition which inspired Virgil's Pollio, it was probably a tradition which had floated from above. To the same region we may trace the allusions to a millennium, which may be found, more or less distinctly, in the many mythologies of the world. But in Scripture alone do we find this doctrine inwrought with the whole system, pervading all its books, and, while thoroughly severed, on the one hand, from absurdity and mysticism, expressed, on the other, in a profusion of figure, and painted in the softest and richest colors. Did the idea of a happy world, whether communicated to the soul of Virgil by current tradition, or caught from the lips of some wandering Jew, or formed by the mere projection of the favorite thought of a golden age upon the canvas of the future, raise him for a time above himself, and inspire one strain matchless among Pagan poets? What a provision, then, must have been made for the production of a world of poetry, from the thick gleams and glimpses of distant glory, scattered over the pages of all the bards of Israel! How sublime the conception, in its own original fountains, reposing under the tree of life, the leaves of which are for the healing of the nations! and especially as we find it flaming around the lips of the prophets of God, who, seeing in the distance the wolf dwelling with the lamb, and the leopard with the kid; the mountain of the Lord's house exalted above the mountains and established above the hills; the New Jerusalem coming down from God, as a bride adorned for her husband; earth uplifted from the neighborhood of hell to that of heaven; the smoke of its every cottage rising like the smoke of an altar; peace brooding on its oceans; righteousness running in its streams; and the very bells of its horses, bearing "Holiness to the Lord"-leaped up exulting at the sight, and sent forward, from their watch-towers, a far cry of recognition and enthusiasm, "Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee." "Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows?" "The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee. Thy sun shall no more go down, neither shall thy moon withdraw itself, for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended." Who, but writers in the highest sense INSPIRED, could often assume, or long sustain, such strains as these? Who, but they, could keep so steadily separate from the deep clouds of the present a prospect so distinct and sublime? Who, uninfluenced by the Spirit of the Lord, would have dared, not merely as a poetic conception, but as a prophetical announcement, to predict what all history and all experience would seem to stamp with the wildest print of Utopia? 'Few, few have striven to make earth heaven,” but as few, unenlightened from on high, have ever long grasped or detained the brilliant possibility. It seems, at least, the last refinement of philosophical conjecture. And yet, in the Hebrew prophets, we find it closing every vista, irradiating every gloom, lying, like a bright western heaven, at the termination of every prophetic day; coloring the gorgeous page of Isaiah; gleaming through the willows where Jeremiah had hung his harp; glaring on the wild eye of Ezekiel, who turns from his wheels," so high that they were dreadful," to show the waters of the sanctuary becoming an immeasurable and universal stream; mingling with the stern denunciations of Micah; tinging with golden edges the dreams of Daniel; and casting transient rays of transcendent beauty amid the obscure and troubled tragedy of the Apocalypse. With respect to a future state, the conceptions of the heathens were not only imperfect and false, but gross and coarse. In that dreary Tartarus, there were indeed many statuesque forms and noble faces marked out from amid the general haze, and visible in the leaden light. There was poetry in the despairing thirst of Tantalus; poetry in the eternal stone, wet with the eternal sweat of Sisyphus; poetry in the daughters of Danaus filling up B* the same everlasting sieve; poetry in that grim figure of Ajax, silent in the shades, and also in that pale form of Dido, gliding from the eye of her lover into the gloom; poetry clustering round the rock of Theseus, and the wheel of Ixion. In their pictures of Elysium, too, there was a soft and melancholy enchantment, most beauteous, yet most rueful to feel. It was "sunlight sheathed." It was heaven, with a shade, not unallied to earth, vailing its brightness. There might be, to quote Wordsworth imitating Virgil, "An ampler ether, a diviner air, And fields invested with purpureal gleams, Climes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day But surely the radiance had not that spirituality, or solemn beauty, which characterizes our heaven.* The agonies, too, were monotonous attitudes of material woe; they lacked dignity and relief; sculptured with rude power, they were sculptured in rock; their line was too uniform and too black; they lacked those redeeming touches which, like white streaks upon marble, mingle with, and carry off, the uniform intensity of gloom. All wretchedness lay upon them; but it was a silent not an eloquent misery. Despair looked through them; but it was dumb, deaf, and dead. Eternity brooded over the whole; but it was dull and idle, like the calm, sullen face of a marsh or moorland, not the living look of a mountain or of the sea. There is no change, no "lower deep conducting to a yet lower," in a descending series. Intercourse with other worlds there is little or none. The region is insulated in its misery-" beyond the beams of noon, and eve's one star." No stray angel looks down suddenly, like a sunbeam, into its darkness. No grand procession comes from afar, to look and wonder at its miseries. It is a neglected ruin, rather than a prison of pain. Such is the heathen hell, as discovered to us, by Virgil, but especially by Homer. * We speak here not so much of the Jewish as of the Christian notions of the future state. |